I just got back from Judo, finally get to start coding. I’ve got two potential ideas at the moment, and I need somewhere to use as a sounding board to pick between them. So here we go:

Evolution Of Enemies

The premise of this one is fairly simple, and has the benefit of being actual evolution rather than intelligent design. On the other hand  I think everyone might be planning some variation on this. Essentially, a bunch of enemies with totally random traits spawn, you get to go beat them up. Every so often two of the living enemies get to breed with each other, creating a new enemy with both of the parents traits, plus or minus a few mutations. Over time as you inevitably kill the weakest of the enemies first the average quality of the enemies gets better and winning becomes increasingly hard. The other main problem with this is that I don’t know exactly how I’d make the traits system work, which would be a major factor.

Build an organism

Played on a 2D grid, spanning the entire window. You start with a single nucleus right in the center. Various environmental hazards then proceed to walk onto the screen which are all capable of ripping your nucleus to shreds. Fortunately for you, just before they walked on screen you had the importunity to build yourself a few phagocytes, into which the unwitting hazards walk getting themselves killed. This repeats with increasingly vicious hazards that you have to wrestle with, including such scary things as pathogens (which can pathfind around defenses), carcinogens (which takes over a square you control, turning it into a useless tumor) and toxins (which spread out like a liquid until they are absorbed by liver cells). At the same time you have to expand your organism to defend itself against these new attackers using extra phagocytes, lymphocytes (which act as antibody turrets), mitochondria (which make everything they touch more powerful), and chloroplasts (which make mitochondria even more effective).

Okay, having typed that out, even though that later one isn’t actually evolution it’s a lot more fun sounding, and I’m sure I’ll be able pass it off somehow as being the same *goal* as evolution, even if it’s not driven by natural selection

And BOOM, an idea is formed. I wonder how much of it I’ll actually get done in time…

EDIT: Change of plan. Going back to idea 1, but in a 2D dungeon crawler-like thing (similar gameplay to legends of yore), you win if you wipe all the enemies out, you lose if they kill you. The more rounds you survive the better. Simples (I think…)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 6:15 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.